Iceland’s ‘Pirates’ eye power in snap election

REYKJAVIK: Icelanders voted on Saturday in a snap election that could see the anti-establishment Pirate Party form the next government in the wake of the Panama Papers tax-dodging scandal and lingering anger over the 2008 financial meltdown.
Voters are expected to punish the incumbent coalition after the Panama Papers revealed a global tax evasion scandal that ensnared several senior politicians and forced former Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson to resign.
Although the current government of the conservative Independence Party and the centrist Progressive Party survived the scandal, it promised a snap election six months before the end of its term in spring 2017.
Prime Minister Sigurdur Ingi Johannsson, who is also the chairman of the Progressive Party, was one of the fist people to vote when the polling station opened in the small Icelandic village of Fludir.
“I’m optimistic. We have found for the last days that a lot of people are coming to us,” Johannsson told AFP.
But three separate polls released a day before the vote showed that the Pirate Party, founded in 2012 by activists, anarchists and former hackers, could win up to 21 percent of the vote and the Left-Green movement up to 16.8 percent.
Each of the polls, conducted by the University of Iceland, research company MMR and Gallup, indicate the incumbent conservative coalition government would most likely be voted out.
“We’re losing support (because of the) big anti-establishment (feeling),” Independence Party MP Birgir Armannsson said.
Final election results will be released shortly after polling stations close, but because no party is expected to win a majority, Iceland’s fate will only be known after coalition negotiations.
The latest wave of a global movement against establishment politics, seen in the US with onetime presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the Five Star Movement in Italy, and the upstart Podemos party in Spain, the Pirate Party could become the Parliament’s second largest group.
“I’m looking for some changes. The system... is not all bad,” said Helgi Mar Gunnarsson, a 54-year-old designer, adding that decision-making should be more transparent.
The people of Iceland should be “more involved,” he told AFP.
The Pirates, who campaign for transparency and the fight against corruption, could form the nation’s second center-left government since Iceland’s independence from Denmark in 1944. The Social Democrats and Greens ruled in a coalition between 2009-2013.
The Pirate Party reached a pre-election agreement with three other leftist and centrist opposition parties, including the Left-Greens, the Social Democrats and the Bright Future Movement, to form a coalition government.
“We think that these parties can cooperate very well ... I think it will be a very feasible governmental choice,” Katrin Jakobsdottir, leader of the Left-Green movement told AFP.